Asheville couple face an empty nest after daughter's departure

Oct. 1, 2011

Anne Dugger with her parents, Martha and Lee, on the campus of Emory & Henry College in Virginia. / Special to the Citizen-Times

Written by

Barbara Blake

ABOUT THIS SERIES

This is the second story in an occasional series following the journey of Martha Dugger and her daughter, Anne, as they face their first year apart: Mom at home in Asheville with her husband, Lee, and Anne a college freshman in Virginia. Find a link to the first installment of this series posted with this story at CITIZEN-TIMES.com/Living.

More

ADVERTISEMENT

It was a week after Anne Dugger left for college before her parents even opened the door to her bedroom.

In spite of the wreckage of random stuff left in the wake of her frenzied departure, they knew the space would feel still and empty - something similar to the feeling in a part of their hearts.

Martha and Lee Dugger had smiles on their faces when they said goodbye to their girl outside her dorm at Emory & Henry College on Aug. 20, determined not to shed a tear or convey any emotion other than excitement.

That’s what parents do. They bite back the pain of letting go and put smiles on their faces, even as the cloying tendrils of loss wrap around their hearts and threaten to squeeze their very breath away.

But back in East Asheville after the two-hour drive home, there was no excited girl to smile for. No reason to put on happy faces and say all the right words, to deliver one final, cheerful wave goodbye.

Now it was just Martha and Lee, alone in the quiet house that the day before was filled with the enormous energy exuded by the daughter they adore beyond measure.

They knew in their minds that the hurt would heal, because parents have watched their children fly from the nest since the world began. But they knew in their hearts that they had to embrace this odd new pain before the healing would begin.

So they closed the door to her empty room and allowed themselves to marinate in the vacant and surreal silence that Anne left behind.

But not for too long.

A bittersweet journey

It’s been six weeks since Anne started school as an art major at her small liberal arts college in southwestern Virginia. She has acclimated with dizzying speed, amassing a posse of new friends, jumping into myriad campus activities and embracing her classes with exuberance.

Martha and Lee are again smiling for real, surviving the letting-go with flying colors after the intensity of the first days of searing loss — thanks, in part, to the generosity of a daughter who, in her college busyness, has blessed them with just enough phone calls and online chats to keep their worries at bay.

(Page 2 of 5)

It’s been a poignant journey, beginning with the drive to Virginia early that Saturday morning, with Anne’s older brother, Logan, coming along to help deliver his sister to school.

Martha said Logan’s presence made the trip even more bittersweet.

“For a moment, as we were driving to Emory & Henry, it felt as if they were small again,” she said. “It was like they decided to revert back to 10 and 6, and they started messing with each other, tickling, and it was really funny — Logan with his comical way, Anne and her laughter, Lee and I tuning in from the front seat.

“It was a moment of time travel for us all before the reality set in that Anne was on her way,” Martha said. “I guess they needed this one last time.”

Closing the door

The days leading up to and including moving day were expectedly chaotic and exhausting, fitting everything — almost — into the car, unloading and setting up in the dorm, making last-minute trips to Lowe’s for items unexpectedly needed.

When it was time to say goodbye, after the hugs and smiles, it was Anne who walked away, confidently, into her dorm and her new life. The ride home was quiet, even Logan uncharacteristically subdued as he processed his little sister’s leaving.

Lee had committed them to attend a party the night they returned from Virginia, and Martha dutifully went.

“We stood around for awhile, and I said, ‘I’ve got to get out of here,’” she said. They came home to the empty, silent house, and to Anne’s empty room.

“I just closed the door, just left it like it was,” Martha said. “The next morning was tough; that’s when it really hit me that she wasn’t there, and what we’d just been through, and it was just a numb kind of feeling, and this ever-present sadness behind my eyes.”

The door to Anne’s room stayed shut for days.

“It took us a week to actually really go back in there,” she said, “and it felt real vacant, and a little bit cold. And then I started kind of cleaning it up.”

While Lee and Martha are extremely close to Anne in different ways, it was Lee who had expressed more worry, afraid he might choke up at the goodbye, wondering how a new normal would feel without the life force that is his daughter. True, he wrote Anne a letter every day for the first two weeks — the kind written with a pen on paper, mailed in an envelope with a stamp. And he has said more than once that he’s glad he has a lot of landscaping work on his plate to focus on.

(Page 3 of 5)

But it was Lee who decided to seize the new normal and begin dating his wife again, beginning with a leisurely dinner adventure with friends downtown four days after Anne left.

“Lee has been incredibly different from what I thought he would be,” Martha said. “He’s all, ‘Hey, we’re empty nesters — we can do this, we can do that.’ We never go out, but he’s made dinner plans, and he’s trying to get me out and about more.”

“I went on a fishing trip to Ocracoke,” Lee said, “and I’ve gotten to do some things I normally don’t do, and work’s kind of going right now, so that’s keeping me focused, and that’s good.

“I still miss having Anne’s energy around, but having good reports coming home from school makes it easier,” he said. “And Martha and I are trying to get to know each other again.”

'The time of my life'

Before Anne left for school, she described the imaginary bubble her mother would draw around her at bedtime when she was a small girl and afraid of the dark, tying it off at the top and sealing it with a kiss on her forehead as she said goodnight.

Anne said she felt armed with that bubble as she started her college adventure, but it turns out she didn’t really need it — even on her first night in the dorm.

“Honestly, the move completely took it out of me, and I was so happy as I crawled under my covers that I fell asleep without any worries whatsoever,” she said. “I thought about home a lot the next couple of days, and thought that I really didn’t like it here. But it just took some adjusting, and now I’m having the time of my life — as cheesy as that may sound.”

Anne said her parents handled the goodbye with grace and good timing.

“My mom teared up a little, but they were really awesome throughout the whole move, helping me with unpacking and getting oriented,” she said. “They handled it really well from what I could tell, and they didn’t linger at all.”

She also gives her parents high marks for not hovering since she’s been at school.

“Our communication has been laid-back — I call when I miss them or when I need something, and vice versa, and my dad sends me postcards just about every week, which is really sweet, and it kind of gives me something to look forward to,” she said.

(Page 4 of 5)

“But I haven’t felt smothered once.”

Settling in

Martha and Lee said there were some “squirrelly” days at Emory & Henry at the beginning, typical of probably 99 percent of college freshman just out of the gate. “First, she felt really out of place, said her roommate was very quiet, that the food was very bland, and kept going on and on,” Martha said. “Then, the first day of classes, she called and said, ‘I love it here. I know somebody in every class, and I have great professors. I just love it.’”

Now, Martha said, her voice a blend of delight and wistfulness, “She has a whole other life without us — going to football games, an outdoor program, dinner at the president’s house. It’s just a different life now.”

Unexpectedly, Anne paid a visit home a couple of weekends ago when she had no classes on Thursday and one of her Friday classes was taking a field trip to Asheville. Martha was elated — even after Anne informed her parents that she would be spending some of her time with a friend here and other friends at Appalachian State University in Boone.

“I’ve had my lip poked out about that for the last couple of days,” Martha confessed before the visit. “I would think she’d want to be with her mama and daddy, but she’s so social and so different from me — I’d just as soon hang out with family and be together. But she’s got such close friendships, I get that.” As it turned out, Anne spent more time at home than she expected when travel plans went awry, and her parents savored the moments they had together. “It was really interesting how mother and daughter fell right back into the same old rhythm, with me trying to drag her out of stores when she wanted to show me something, and I ended up buying something at her urging,” Martha said.

“I’ve had a couple of nerd moments when I’ve said, ‘Uh oh, should I be tucking the tail in on this shirt?’ and I know she’d go, ‘Oh, mom, you can’t go out in that!’”

(Page 5 of 5)

As much as Martha and Lee miss their daughter, they are happy that she’s thriving at school, and grateful that she is staying in touch on a reasonable level. “The only needy call I’ve gotten is, ‘Mom, please send me something home-baked and something healthy,’ which I promptly did — twice,” Martha said.

There are still the occasional gut-punches, like after grocery-shopping trips.

“I bought stuff a couple of weeks ago — I don’t know what I was thinking, just going about business as usual,” Martha said. “I got home and said, ‘Why did I buy this? Nobody’s going to eat this.’”

But she and Lee are getting their rhythm as empty nesters, just as Anne is as a happy college student.

“It’s interesting, because some part of me feels lighter, because I’m not worried about her day to day like I was when she was here,” Martha said.

“Well, I am, but it’s kind of like being on an airplane — it’s out of your control.”

Part of it is “knowing she’s in a safe place — although I know there’s no totally safe place,” she said. “I just have to hope that we’ve raised her to be smart and understand where the dangers are, and she knows that. I miss not going in and giving her a kiss goodnight and putting her bubble around her,” Martha said. “But she’s growing up.”